The Girl from Haukaloolloo

By Uri Jerzy Nachimson

Sarah had ambitions; she believed in herself but also in a higher power that protected her. An orphan girl finds her way in a cruel world at the beginning of the 19th century in pogrom-stricken anti-Semitic Poland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Uri Jerzy Nachimson
• Release date: Feb 21, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224798773

Uri Jerzy Nachimson

Uri Jerzy Nachimson was born in Szczecin, Poland, in 1947. Two years later, his parents emigrated to Israel. In 1966, he served in the Israeli army in the Northern Command for three years. He participated in the Six-Day War as a photographer in combat.As a freelance photographer, he wandered around Prague as crowds demonstrated in front of Soviet tanks. His travels to Egypt are the inspiration for his book, Seeds of Love.In 1990, he returned for the first time to Poland to seek his roots. He was deeply affected by the attitude of the Poles towards the Jews during and after World War II, and he started to research the history of the Jews of Poland. Thus, the trilogy was born: Lilly's Album, The Polish Patriot, and Identity.Uri's grandmother, Ida Friedberg, was the granddaughter of the Jewish writer A.S. Friedberg, editor of the Polish Jewish newspaper Hazefira, and the author of many books.In 2005, Uri moved to Tuscany, Italy, where he lives with his wife. While in Cortona, he wrote Two Margherita, Broken Hearts in Boulevard Unirii, Recalled to Life, Violette and Ginger, The Girl from Haukaloolloo, Isabella, In the Depth of Silence, and others.

Book preview

Chapter 1

My mother always told me I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I knew it wasn't true because Mina was more attractive than me, as were Goldie and even Debra, who was only a year and ten months old but chubby with deep blue eyes and golden curls hanging on her forehead. Still, I enjoyed hearing the sweetest sentences, especially the tickles when she whispered in my ear, and I would cringe and laugh uncontrollably.

Then, Mother died and left us alone, and I was sad, but I didn't cry because I thought that ten-year-old girl was already grown up and didn't cry. On the day she was buried, there were a lot of people in the cemetery, and I was pushed to the front by the pit so that I could say goodbye to her for the last time.

There was a Rabbi with a big hat and a long black beard who shouted, cried, and prayed, swaying from side to side as if she were his mother.

And I looked at him in great astonishment. Our father was standing next to him, all pale, and the lapel of his shirt was torn. None of my sisters were in the cemetery because neighbors cared for them. Then, when they had covered the pit and placed some bouquets of flowers and small stones, they all dispersed. I returned home with my father by foot because our house was within walking distance of the synagogue, behind which lay the town cemetery where we lived.

The house was dark and cold. Some people came and sat down on cushions and prayed. The neighbor Gitel arrived with a large pot full of Tsholent (Traditional Stew) and placed it on the stove to heat, and immediately, the pleasant smell spread throughout the house.

I wanted to go into my room, but Father looked at me with the calf's big eyes that sprouted through the thick glasses, and I understood that he wanted me to stay. Fatigue fell on me, and I fell asleep while sitting beside him, while my head leaned on my father's shoulder.

The following days repeated themselves throughout the week. I didn't go to school, and nobody came to visit me. I was afraid to ask Dad when all this would be over, fearing it would make him angry or sad.

I found a pin in the rug that must have fallen from Mom's sewing toolbox.

I stabbed myself in the thigh to feel pain that might make me shed a tear.

I wanted to hurt myself so that I would suffer, maybe because I didn't feel any pain due to my mother's death. Perhaps a strange longing for her caresses, but nothing more than that. I have always heard it said that being an orphan is a great pain in the heart, but I did not feel any pain in the heart, except for the pain in my thigh, which hurt very much, especially when I went deep to stab until most of the pin was stuck in the flesh. I was surprised that the more the pain, the more I enjoyed it.

Father noticed the blood stains that had soaked into my dress and hurried to take me to the bath. He undressed me entirely and washed my wounds with a towel dipped in hot, soapy water. I didn't like his penetrating looks, and I also felt embarrassed by the touches of his fingers that passed over my naked body. Don't do it again, he said.

When a week passed, the worshipers stopped showing up at our house, and we were left alone.

Dad said that the following day, I would go back to school, and he would go to work.

My father worked as a butcher in his brother-in-law's shop, my late mother's brother. He hated his brother-in-law, who at every opportunity called my father the most unnecessary person I know.

My father would not answer him because he was afraid of losing the family's livelihood, but when he and my mother were alone, I would hear him arguing with her and saying that one day, he would cut his throat.

I also heard curses and profanities that I won't repeat so as not to defile my mouth because my mother always said that whoever curses will have a filthy mouth forever, and I was afraid of this because I didn't know exactly what she meant.

Chapter 2

In the following days, I moved temporarily (so they told me) with my neighbor Gitel, who was childless and raised ten cats. My three sisters were given to another neighbor living at the village's other end.

Gitel treated me well. Although she did not pamper me with caresses or whispers in my ear, she took care of all my shortcomings.

I would see my father often. When I would go to school in the morning, I would pass by the butcher shop and see him sitting on a wooden stool, plucking feathers from geese. When he would notice me, I would wave my hand, and then he would look down and continue his work. Knowing how much Dad hated working at Uncle Shloime, my heart would shrink.

In my school, there were only girls. The only man, apart from the maintenance man, was the teacher, Mr. Grawsky, who was a bizarre creature not only for his resemblance to a rooster without a crest but also for his twitting voice and his funny walk with tiny and quick steps but also for the convulsions that would attack his face from time to time, especially when he was furious.

My classmates were all Jewish, like me, from the village. Although Christian Poles lived in our vicinity, they did not send their daughters to our school, possibly due to the limitation that all schooling was conducted in Yiddish, except for an hour a day of the Polish language classes, and to the strained relations that always existed between Jews and Christians.

In the rabbi's house, there was a Midrash where the boys would study Torah; at the end of Yom Kippur, we would all meet in the only synagogue in town to hear the blowing of the shofar that heralds the end of the fast. Even on Rosh Hashanah and Hanukkah, our father would take us all to light candles.

No holidays were celebrated in Gitel’s house. Mother would light the Shabbat candles at my parent's house on Friday evening and bless them, but I never saw Gitel do this.

When I asked her where her husband was, she avoided answering. Once, while drinking a little too much wine, she said that he went to America and promised to send her a ticket for a ship that would sail from Gdansk to Ellis Island in New York, but the ticket never arrived, and in the five years since he left, she only received one letter in which he wrote that he works hard for a living and that in America, money doesn't grow on trees. What was the idiot thinking? Is that what he thought? Money on trees? I was very embarrassed that Gitel could not understand what he meant.

A year after I moved in with Gitel, I started calling her Mama Gitel. She was good to me and liked me very much, and I didn't know how to repay her for her behavior. From that day on, she started hugging and kissing me and even offered to scrub my back with a well-soaped loofah, which I liked very much.

Every Sunday morning, Gitel would go out with some of the vegetables and fruits she grew in her yard and walk to the Rynek - the farmers' market in the town square. There, she would spread a map on top of a wooden box and offer wares. The Christian Poles loved her because of her reasonableness to a Polish farmer who spoke Polish well. She would greet them with the traditional blessing Slawa Boga - Glory to God, and she was the only one in the market who always managed to sell her products within an hour or two, fold the map, and with the earnings buy a few necessary products for her home.

Once every few weeks, Gitel would bring me to my father's house for the traditional meeting with my sisters, whom I would meet every day at school, but for a short time. At my parents' house, the meeting was different.

Gitel would leave me and arrange to come back and pick me up at the end of the day before it got dark. Dad would prepare a meaty lunch from leftover meat he scraped off the bones or a muscle slicer his brother-in-law gave him for his daughters with the warning that he wouldn't eat it himself.

Father's house was neglected, dirty, and falling apart. Father was depressed and hardly spoke to us. From time to time, he would look through the lenses of his thick glasses, and half a smile would appear on his face, a twisted kind of smile that revealed yellow teeth that did not add to my disgust towards him.

Chapter 3

At the end of July 1914, a rumor passed through the village that a great war had begun between European countries, and the news needed to be more specific to us as to who was fighting whom. I was eleven years old, but I matured before my time thanks to my mother, Gitel, who was sharp-minded and taught me the philosophy of life and the way to survive in any situation I would encounter.

A militaristic unit arrived to recruit men to defend the homeland one day. That morning, my father cut off his index finger to avoid being drafted.

Screams of grief were heard from every house, and women grabbed their husbands' clothes to be dragged along the dirt road until they were put on carriages that were waiting on the Rynek square.

At the end of the day, two men were counted who hanged themselves to death, six who amputated themselves (among them my father), and twenty-seven men who were forcibly taken to undergo training and join General Pilsudski's emerging army, including Shloime, the butcher.

Our Catholic Polish neighbors were also taken, but they went willingly and looked with contempt at the frightened Jews who mumbled words of prayer and huddled together, trembling and pale-faced.

My father managed the butchery from the day Shloime was drafted into the army. For help, he hired a young man to pluck the feathers and clean the place.

Days passed, and spring was coming; the trees began to blossom, and life in the village continued a boring routine. There were days when I thought life was meaningless; for a moment, I never imagined that something terrible and horrendous could happen. Literally, there was no reason. But it all happened on Sunday in the early morning hours and was a complete surprise when no one was prepared for it.

At first, there were cries of distress in Polish from women dressed in black who ran out of the church with heavy wooden sticks in their hands. They ran towards the first houses of the Jewish neighborhood, which were the most extreme and bordered on the Catholic quarter of the village.

An old Jew standing at the entrance to his garden, looking at them curiously, was the first to be struck.

They started hitting him with their rods, and one of them picked up a stone and hit him in the face.

At first, he tried to defend himself but soon lost consciousness, and they continued to hit him in the head. His wife, who heard the screams, came out of her house and ran towards them.

Several young men emerged from behind with a horse, grabbed her by the arms, tore off her clothes, and dragged her into the street.

A thick rope was placed around her neck, and she was tied to the horse that began to gallop and drag her behind while her body parts were torn from her in the process.

Screams were heard from all sides, and smoke could be seen rising from one of the houses in the distance. A large crowd of rural Poles with hoes and pitchforks appeared as they all marched towards the Rynek, shouting, Death to the Jews who spread the diseases.

Mother Gitel locked the door and began to move furniture to block the trespassers, Get up to the attic quickly and hide! she shouted at me when the trespassers had already started banging on her door.

The window panes were smashed, and someone entered through the window. Mother Gitel grabbed a kitchen knife and stood ready to come.

I looked through the crack between the roof sills, and my heart pounded hard. Suddenly, there was a tremendous bang, and the door was thrown open.

The cupboard was knocked over as four young men entered and began looting from the shelves all the jars of canned cabbage she had prepared for the winter, a box of flour, sugar, and jams.

One lifted a sack of potatoes on his back, spitting toward Mother Gitel. When two of the robbers left, three remained standing in front of her and laughing, What are you going to do with that knife? One of them pulled out his penis. You might want to circumcise me, Jewish bitch. I looked down, and tears flowed down my cheeks. I couldn't help the woman I loved so much and who returned my love and devotion.

Then, one of the guys threw a clay pot at her and momentarily diverted her attention; the other attacked her and hit her in the face with his fist while grabbing the knife out of her hands.

They started to tear off her clothes and strip